THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
EMBODIED TRUTH
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached Easter Sunday, April 23, 2000,
at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.I have not done the math myself, but I am told that this year Easter comes within one day of the latest it can come.* This makes much of the imagery that goes with Easter to some degree awkward. Usually, Easter comes right on the heels of the first day of Spring. There is then the opportunity to use the images of Spring as a part of its celebration: the rebirth of life, the constant renewal that Spring has historically symbolized. Coming this late in the year that just doesn't quite work. Which is just fine because here in Hawaii it never worked very well, anyway.
This morning I want to take head-on the difficulty of the images of Easter for Unitarian Universalists. It is not possible, given our heritage, to tell you, "Here is A, B, C, D, E" that you are supposed to believe or not believe. For over 450 years, as a religious tradition we have recognized that if God exists he knows whether you're putting him on. Only what you really do believe--and not what we try to threaten, coerce or cajole you into believing--is going to make any difference anyway.
Modern folk have problems dealing with the claims that the Christian heritage has made for this season of the year. We are stuck looking back at the creeds and the claims with a kind of literalness that seriously gets in the way of our understanding of how they functioned, still function and can function in the lives of people.
Many of you were raised in traditions where, as a part of every Sunday morning church service, you were expected to recite the Nicene Creed. Many a time I have been in church services where you could hear a slight change in the volume and tone around the congregation as various and sundry people left out various sections. What is lost in our limited historical memory about the creeds and the claims is the historical context in which they emerged. Most of us, when we hear the Nicene Creed, hear ". . . born of the VIRGIN MARY, . . . was RESURRECTED." We hear only the miracles that we are asked to suspend disbelief and somehow embrace.
But at the time the creeds were written, what called them forth was a series of claims and affirmations about this Jesus that were really quite problematic. The attempt of the creeds was not to affirm what we hear, but something else entirely. The miracle part was simply taken for granted. Nobody was being asked to believe anything weird, strange or contradictory to their then current world view. The miraculous aspects were simply a part of the atmosphere that everybody inhaled. Nobody ever really thought all that much about the miracles. After all, religious leaders were supposed to do those things and, of course, Jesus did.
The affirmation of the creed was that Jesus was born, that he suffered, that he died ! The Nicene Creed was designed to counteract a particular set of heresies. Unless you studied the church fathers you haven't the foggiest notion what they were talking about. Since nobody in their right mind chooses to study the church fathers these days, only crazy people like me know about these things.
The first of those heretics were the Docetic Gnostics who preached that Jesus wasn't really a human being. He was actually God come down to walk among us; just pretending, as it were. The word docetic means "appear to be." He only "appeared to be" a human being. Of course he could heal people, forgive sins, do all kinds of miraculous things; because, after all, that was God himself walking the earth.
One of the gospels that did not make it into our Bible actually has an interesting twist in the crucifixion description. By their understanding, if the Roman soldiers had taken Jesus out to Golgotha and hanged him on that cross, Jesus could have hung there forever. This is, after all, God just pretending to be a human being. This would have been a little embarrassing; awkward, at the very least.
According to this version of the story, Simon the Siren was pressed out of the crowd to carry Jesus' cross and take his place. According to this gospel, it was in fact Simon the Cyrene who got crucified. The Roman soldiers didn't give a darn. All they were told was, "Go crucify three guys." They went and crucified three guys, went home and had dinner. It was Simon who hung on the cross and Jesus just sort of melted back into the crowd.
For the Docetic Gnostics, this apparent man was indeed God himself in our midst. In negotiating the language of the Creed, the church was at pains to affirm that, no, whatever else we must make of this first century rabbi, he must be understood to be a real honest-to-goodness human being. Otherwise, the significance of this event, what he taught us, what he revealed in his life, is irrelevant. Of course, God simply pretending to walk around AS IF he were a man could do all of those things, be all of those things. But Jesus was human !
Most Christians today believe, or think they are supposed to believe, that Jesus is God. They repeat the creed having no idea that it was written to counteract that very belief.
The second heresy that was rife at the time this creed was put together was a group called the Antinomians (meaning against the Law). One of the interesting ironies is that we only know about most of these heresies by listening to the church fathers complain about them. You can imagine if someone only knew about you by the rumors that they had heard your neighbors tell about you; or worse, your enemies. The Antinomians claimed that only what you do "in the spirit" matters. They insisted that in Jesus we have transcended the (Jewish) Law and it's only spiritual things that are important. Physically, in your body, you can do anything you want because the body doesn't count. It's only spirit that matters. Interesting juxtaposition of words: only "spirit" that "matters."
The affirmation of the creed, way back in the fourth century was that, whatever else it is that we wish to claim for that fourth century rabbi, the concreteness of it has to be the first thing said. We hear much of the language of the New Testament in that spiritualized sense.
One of those statements in the Gospel of John certainly makes it sound like Jesus is making grand and glorious claims for himself is, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except by me." Today, if anyone were to make such a statement, it would get them stuck out at Hawaii State Hospital.
One of the sad things about the literature of this heritage is that the book does not contain a preface warning you that what you are about to read is not quasi-history, not moral rules, not even substitute science. This is the literature given to us by the poets of the Christian heritage. If the book had such a preface, we would say, "Oh, poetry. OK, now I've got to listen to metaphors and images. I've got to listen for what it means." But, not letting our poets be poets, we try to turn them and this literature into something else entirely.
Our anthem this morning speaks of "Jesus, the word of God incarnate." And this is one of those poetic images that is part of the rich heritage. The writer of the Gospel of John uses the term te logos, "the word." "In the beginning was the logos," he says. The logos was a technical philosophical term in the philosophy of Philo of Alexandria. The logos is the principle of rational ordering and creative transformation of the universe. The author of the Gospel of John understands Jesus to have brought his life so into sync with that logos that it was appropriate to say that Jesus was that logos made flesh among us.
No one would be terribly confused if we said that someone had brought his or her life so into sync with the Tao that it was poetically appropriate to say that they were one with the Tao, that they were, in a sense, the incarnation of the Tao. But, because we've gotten so in the habit of reading this literature through the eyes of ideology, these poetic images are so often lost for us. What Jesus is affirming, when you read the stuff before and after and in context, (or, at least, what the writer, John, is affirming in putting these words in Jesus' mouth,) is that the Way equals the Life equals the Truth. He is speaking here about the human attempt to overcome that alienation from our own insides that leaves us feeling so desperately alone, so desperately separated, so isolated. The only response to that alienation that is true, that works, is indeed a life, actual human behavior. How do you come into the Father? How do you come into right relationship with what is deepest, freeing, joyous?
Jesus personified that "God" as abba. The translators of the New Testament often leave his Aramaic word for God, abba, laying there untranslated. One of the reasons that the translators do that is that it's embarrassing to translate it. The most appropriate idiomatic translation of that little word in the New Testament is not "father," it is "da-da." Abba is the word that a small child speaks to his or her own father. Da-da. Not exactly your grand, all seeing puppeteer of the universe in control of everything. It is a different, significant and dramatic poetic image.
Judaism, although it is instructed in the Ten Commandments to be very careful about ever personifying Yahweh at all, also has a personification of this. It's the figure of wisdom. Interestingly enough, the figure of wisdom in Jewish literature is female.
None of those folk back there in the first century turned any of this into ideology, into intellectual propositions to which one must somehow manufacture intellectual assent. Even St. Paul, who gets such a bad rap for trying to translate the religious experience of these crazy Jews in a jerkwater corner of the Roman Empire into vocabulary that makes sense to sophisticated Hellenistic Roman citizens, did not turn the Christian experience into mere beliefs.
The Way is a discipline, a practice, a set of actual behaviors, things that you actually do; not just some stuff to believe. The truth is not some capital T proposition. The truth that matters is a life actually lived in the real world, day-to-day. It has to do with the way we enter into relationships with ourselves, our families, our loved ones, our communities, the larger world out there. It is a life !
Here again, interestingly, the New Testament term translated into English as "eternal life" contains no implication of extent of years. The Greek term translated as "eternal life" is Zoe Aeon, "the life of the age," a qualitatively different kind of life shared in community, in interpersonal relationships.
There is a school of Buddhism that gets interpreted, wrongly I think, "Buddha will take care of everything. Just say Buddha's name right once and you're in." This despite the fact that Buddha's teaching is about transforming your life so that you suffer less and create less suffering for others as you live in the world.
There is, similarly too often, an understanding of a certain sort of Christianity that gets interpreted as "Jesus will take care of everything. Just believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and everything is taken care of." But whatever else it is that Christians have wanted to say about Jesus -- and they have, from time to time, wanted to say an awful lot of stuff -- he clearly stood in the prophetic tradition, in the tradition of Amos:
But let justice roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever flowing stream.
In the tradition of Micah:
He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justly, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Jesus launches his own ministry in Nazareth, in the synagogue there. As is the tradition, the visiting rabbi is invited to read from the Torah, from the Scripture. He pulls down off the shelf the scroll of Isaiah, and he reads from the 61st chapter,
...the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to poor;
he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;...
That's not theology, that's not creeds, that's not beliefs. That is a way of truth that is a life lived.
The Scripture that is being read around the world this morning, out of the last chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, is the vocabulary of first century Palestine. It is spoken in the metaphors of a Jewish community trying to make sense of its own tragic history, trying to wrench meaning out of its experience of renewed hope, its liberated compassion, its hunger for justice and joyousness in a world that contained precious little of either.
Can we listen loud enough to hear that these are often our concerns as well? We read the creeds and the beliefs through the eyes of ideology. We pay no attention to the context of their creation as if somehow they were abstractions dropped down in our midst to be accepted by some wonderful wrench of your belly button two turns to the left. We do not hear the human experience that they are at pains to make sense of and to share with us over the centuries.
In religion, in spirituality, if you prefer, in those issues that cut deep to the sense of who we are and what being human means on this planet we share so densely with so many other people; the only truths that matter are embodied truths, truths that issue forth in a life shared together. You are not required to believe every metaphor ever used in the history of the heritage. You're not even required to think that every single one of those metaphors ever used is an apt metaphor. I imagine some people saying at the time, "Oh, come on, Paul. That's a rather awkward way of trying to say it." To think something is true or wise, but awkwardly stated, and therefore not take it into your life is the same as thinking it's false, is to choose to continue in alienation.
Whatever the early Christian church meant by "resurrection," they understood clearly that the purpose of those ideas and insights was the transformation of real, concrete, bodily, this-worldly lives. In that sense, they were radically humanist !
Throughout that teaching the place that Jesus constantly keeps pointing us is away from the rules, away from the rituals, and back to that which is deepest, most profound, most transcending of our petty concerns. He points us always back to the human dimension, the connectedness to one another that so often we would deny, so often are too busy to acknowledge, so often forget. It's that connection, that concertinas that the heritage constantly points us back to.
Happy Easter.